Twenty Truths About Himura Kenshin
by MiekoYagyu
Summary: Kenshin thinks over a few things, from his childhood to his new home in Tokyo. Done in the twenty truths format.


**Twenty Truths About Himura Kenshin**

**Disclaimer: **I do not own Rurouni Kenshin, nor do I own the idea of the twenty truths format. This is just for fun, not profit. However, if I COULD get some money for this, I wouldn't say no. Eheheh.

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**1. **Himura Kenshin was six years old when his family died, leaving him alone. The cholera had taken them away and also a good chunk of the village he had lived in. The strange thing was, he didn't even get sick.

**2. **Kenshin never fully forgave himself for that fact.

**3.** Of all the names he had been given, (Shinta, Kenshin, Himura, Battousai, Ken-san) he hates 'Demon of Kyoto' the most. It brings him back to his old village when the adults would whisper about him behind his back ("Look at his hair! Where did _that_ come from?"), and the children would talk about him to his face ("My parents say that since you have red hair, you must be a demon. Hey, is that true?"). Whenever someone called him a demon during the Bakumatsu, he would fall back on his old defense, ignoring them.

**4.** Kenshin had two older brothers. One was Ryo, and the other was Sota. Ryo was the first-born, and had been the most protective of "Shin-chan". Whenever Sanosuke started talking about friends and how he would protect them until the day he died, Kenshin remembered Ryo.

Misao reminds him of Sota. They both were energetic, and childish. Sota had been the one who had carved him the top he carried around with him everywhere, until he left it in a burning house that he had spent some of the best months of his life in.

**5.** Kenshin started drinking in the Bakumatsu. At first, it had tasted okay. A bit bitter, but okay. Then he started to kill more and more people, and then the sake had started tasting more and more like blood. After Tomoe died, he stopped drinking. He had his first drink in years when Sano had his little party (which, Kenshin remembered, ended up with Kenshin chopping off bomb wicks). To his surprise, it had tasted… okay. Bitter, with some blood mixed in, but it was bearable.

**6.** One of Kenshin's favorite hobbies is to people-watch. He did it a lot in Kyoto, when he was younger. He had often sat in the small window ledge, watching the pretty maiko glide across the street, the samurai swagger, and the farmers look around at the temples in amazement. It helped to remind him that _this _was the reason he was fighting, for the people of Japan. The odd quirk stayed with him throughout his life, during his rurouni years traveling Japan, and when he had come across the Kamiya Dojo. His favorite person to watch (not that he has ever told anyone), is Kaoru.

**7.** Kenshin was never really religious. Sure, he attended the festivals when he was young, heck, even Hiko loved to go to the festivals (most likely due to the fantastic sake they served only then). But after Kenshin had grown world-weary at the ripe old age of fourteen (coincidentally after a month of assassinating people), he felt that if the kami actually paid attention to people, then Kenshin wouldn't be in the whole sticky, bloody mess. The feeling was exponentially increased after Tomoe and the Otsu Incident.

**8.** Kenshin had seriously contemplated suicide five times in his life. The first happened after a few days he had learned that Ryo had died, leaving him alone in a hostile village. He had been ready to throw himself into a river and drown, when he realized that his parents probably would be disappointed in him if he died.

The second time happened after he was sold to slavery at age seven by his caretakers. The slavers had been awful. They never beat him, but they constantly terrified him by telling what was going to happen to him once they managed to sell him to some seedy little place. They never tried anything, because, as they delighted in telling the small, scared redhead, "It would lower your price." Then Kasumi-san, Sakura-san, and Akane-san had come along to protect him, and all thoughts of suicide left him, and only thoughts of protecting them rang in his head.

The third happened after he killed for the third time. He had kept hearing his victims' screams of agony looping over and over and over in his head. His food had starting tasting like blood, and he began having the horrible, horrible nightmares of corpses dragging him down to hell with them. He had pulled out his wakizashi Katsura-san had loaned him and was about to plunge it into his stomach when he remembered his promise that he would help Katsura-san. Putting the wakizashi back into his sheath was one of the hardest things he had ever accomplished.

The fourth time occurred after he killed Tomoe. He had been maddened with grief and he had picked up Tomoe's diary and had read the entry of Akira Kiyosato's death. For a few short moments, he was ready to impale himself at the thought of not only taking away Tomoe's life; he had also taken away her happiness. Then Katsura-san had come along and made him make another promise.

The fifth time came about after Kaoru's supposed death. The only thing that stopped him then was the thought that death was too good for him.

**9. **Having red hair and violet eyes confused Kenshin just as much as it did everyone else. Even he and his parents didn't know where it came from. His parents and all his brothers had dark brown eyes and black hair. The only thing that proved that he wasn't some product of his mother being unfaithful was the fact that Kenshin had his father's facial structure. It irked Kenshin that people used to (and still do) think he was a foreigner, or mixed blood. Then he decided that it was better than having people think he was demon spawn.

**10.** Unbeknownst to most people, Kenshin's favorite food is inarizushi. The sweet-tasting, tofu pouch stuffed with sushi rice was always a special treat his parents made for him and his brothers when they could. When Kenshin mentioned this to Hiko, his shishou had laughed mockingly (as he was wont to do) and asked if it had anything to do with his red hair.

**11.** Kenshin, after hearing that, had given Hiko an icy glare that could've stopped charging bulls cold. "I," he had said with the bite of a glacier in his voice, "am not a kitsune in disguise." Hiko had cocked an eyebrow, but let the matter drop.

**12.** Sometimes Kenshin wishes that he never picked up a sword, or that he just stayed with Hiko up on that cold, lonely mountain, or maybe just dying in the field where all the slaves and bandits were murdered. But then one of his friends will amble up to him whenever he thinks that, and start talking to him about this and that, and then he's grateful he had managed to end up here.

**13.** Kenshin is jealous of Kaoru. He sees her as pure, worthy, and most of all, _innocent_. Kenshin would give almost anything to be innocent like her again. She is the embodiment of the kind of swordsman Kenshin wants to be. To be able to wield a sword of life, and not death. Even with his sakabatou, Kenshin knows that the sword style behind it is still a force of destruction, and pain, and suffering.

**14.** People keep commenting about how Shinomori Aoshi was (and is) an ice cube (coughYahikoandSanocough), but Kenshin knows that Aoshi has nothing on what Kenshin was like during his time as Hitokiri Battousai. That makes him wonder at times if they knew that he had been a freaking glacier to Aoshi's icicle, that they would still be as friendly as before.

**15.** Kenshin gets sick of people challenging him for the title of Best Swordsman. Sometimes he seriously muses over sending them over to one Hiten Mitsurugi master's hut, to get back at both the fools and Hiko. The idiots would get their hides handed to them, and Hiko would be annoyed. That, Kenshin thinks, is only fair.

**16. **Kenshin's favorite color has and always will be blue. This fact has nothing to do with the fact that a certain assistant master's eye color is the same shade of blue. Nope. None at all.

**17. **People rib him all the time about him and cooking, but cooking is one of his favorite chores. He had watched his mother cook and she had taught him when he was too little to help out with the rice fields. So he doesn't mind that people call him a woman (okay, maybe he cares a _little_ bit, but seriously, he's very secure in his masculinity, thank you very much), because it means that he can still have one tie to his past that isn't tainted.

**18. **Kenshin loves children because they are everything he isn't, but also because they are everything he used to be.

**19. **Kenshin is terrified that one day, he'll snap and go back to being Battousai, the cold teenager that killed while ripping his soul to shreds and everybody will know that he was scared, and hurt, and lonely. He thinks it better that everyone hates Battousai, because then he doesn't haveto face the fact that _he's still not better. _

**20.** Nobody knows that Kenshin is a mask for the hurting Battousai. Battousai was a mask to protect young Kenshin, who in turn was a mask for Shinta. Kenshin has been keeping up his masks to protect himself from breaking into shards like those new glass windows he's heard about, but the problem is that he's done it for too long, and now he doesn't know what's his real self, and what is a façade. And it scares him more than anything else.

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**Author's Note: **This… this was FUN! I loved doing this. I hadn't seen a Twenty Truths for the RK fandom yet, so I decided to do one. And who else to do but our favorite Japanese redhead? Note that most of this stuff is crap I made up. Truth Twenty is personal canon for me, but… yeah.

Inarizushi is really good! You can get it at most sushi you can buy and take home (like Target!Sushi…), but most sushi restaurants don't serve it, for some odd reason. Inarizushi is associated with the Shinto deity Inari (Inari's gender likes to switch around a lot), who's messengers are foxes, or kitsune. Kitsune in Japanese folk lore are notorious for shape-shifting into people. Kitsune sometimes considered good, or bad (like ghosts), but all are mischievous. Kenshin doesn't appreciate being called a fox. Although, if he was one (but we all know that Megumi's the fox!), he'd probably like oden more. If you keep with Japanese mythology.


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